Which Quadrant of The United States Produces The Best Basketball Players?
Its hard to measure sports performance from box scores as they actually provide very little insight into whats actually going on in the game. Thankfully the folks over at FiveThirtyEight™ have invented what they call the “Raptor Score”
This score is used primarily to make predictions on upcoming games, and is used as a general metric of “how good” Its described on their website as:
“RAPTOR consists of two major components that are blended together to rate players: a “box” (as in “box score”) component, which uses individual statistics (including statistics derived from player tracking and play-by-play data), and an “on-off” component, which evaluates a team’s performance when the player and various combinations of his teammates are on or off the floor”
They use this score to determine the outcome of team match-ups and also grade players as a whole.
What I wanted to find out was where the best players came from. Was there a hot-spot in the country that a lot of the best come from?
What I needed to find out
Where do the best defensive players come from?
Where do the best offensive players come from?
Where do the best all-around players come from?
The Process
The first thing to do was find an average of the three scores given, the “RAPTOR total, RAPTOR defensive, and RAPTOR offensive” The average will help us reduce bias in our data-set based on population.
The country was divided into these four quadrants (Not exactly equal or very scientific but geography never was.)
The Result
Defensive Scores
To a rather large surprise the midland area of the United States crushed the rest of the country on defense. It is possible this data is in error as there are few people who come from this area.
Offensive Scores
With our offensive scores its no surprise the west coast takes the cake due to players like James Harden who is the player with the highest RAPTOR score in the NBA currently.
Total Score
We learned that the west side of the country produced the best players on the current roster. They had edged out everyone by quite a bit and appear very superior
